Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Yesterday marked a frustrating juncture in EFF’s long-running lawsuit against mass surveillance, Jewel v. NSA, filed on behalf of AT&T customers whose communications and telephone records are being vacuumed by the National Security Agency.

A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.

Judge White of the Northern District of California just issued an order granting the government's motion for partial summary judgment in Jewel v. NSA, EFF's longest-running case challenging mass spying.

EFF will keep fighting the unlawful, unconstitutional surveillance of ordinary Americans by the U.S. government. Today's ruling in Jewel v. NSA was not a declaration that NSA spying is legal. The judge decided instead that "state secrets" prevented him from ruling whether the program is constitutional.

President Obama recently announced slight changes to NSA data collection practices. The recent tweaks mean two new privacy protections for those that U.S. law considers foreigners (in this case, people who are outside of the United States borders who are neither U.S. citizens nor legal U.S. residents).

Perhaps you’re thinking Obama is using his executive authority to stop the mass surveillance of all Internet traffic of people worldwide? Nope, not quite. The new protections are:

Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does have a limit: census data.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) exists to ensure that national security does not trump privacy and civil liberties, and it has been especially busy since the publication of the first Snowden leak. Congress and the President asked the Board to review the use of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, as well as the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2014, PCLOB published two reports addressing these issues. And last week, the Board published a “Recommendations Assessment Report [pdf].”